The final assignment in my PPS825 (Intro Health Policy) class for Masters students this fall was to develop a plan for how the students planned to care for their parents if/when they needed help and support. The students in the class took this very seriously and did such a great job on this.

The assignment prompt is below and could be useful to help you think through some of the issues. I am in the process of trying to get a book contract for a working title “How to care for your parents without killing yourself” and used several draft chapters as course materials this fall. I am planning to crank back up some blogging focused on this topic in 2019.

End of Semester Assignment in Lieu of a Final Exam, PPS 825

Due December 7, 2018

Identify an older person (parent, grand parent, etc.) and develop a plan for how they will be cared for as they age and potentially need help and support from someone else/others to manage basic life navigation like paying bills, shopping, keeping up with medical appointments and taking prescriptions on time. Later they may need help with activities like dressing, bathing, using the toilet and eating. Also consider this person’s (it could be a couple if you wish) current housing needs as well as their future ones. In developing this plan, consider these questions and ideas, that may not be equally relevant in all cases:

Age and likelihood of when s/he may need care, or what type, and for how long?

What are the biggest problems that you foresee in making a plan to care for this loved one? Seeing it through.

Be clear about help Navigating life, housing and more basic care. Think through how these are related, especially the timing of changes (earlier housing changes could reduce fall risks, for example).

How many people will be involved in caring for this person(s)? Have you communicated about this?

Has this loved one made clear statements of preference for these and/or related matters? In related fashion, do they have a will? Plans for where they will be buried/cremation? Have durable power of attorney of any type been considered?

Have these issues been discussed with your siblings/others who will view themselves as having a stake and/or a say in how this person(s) is cared for? If no, can you initiate a discussion? If there are tensions, how can you seek to address and reduce them?

Products:

A 500 word letter addressed to the family in question, laying out the basics of your plan for caring for this person(s), including specific questions that you think should be asked and answered to prepare for the future. Be sure to note uncertainty that you may have, but also provide your recommendation(s) about what should be done to care for or to prepare to care for a loved one.

Longer document of 2,500 words that lays out more details about the plan, including a timeline of important questions to answer, broken down into next 6 months, next 3 years, next 6 years, next 20 years. These time periods may not all be equally relevant for all situations.

1,500 words that lays out at least 2 public policy changes, and 1 individual change that you can undertake that you think would help your children when the time comes for them to begin talking with you about a plan to take care of you.

Any documentation in the way of appendices to support you analysis and decisions.

I had a letter to the editor to the Raleigh, N.C. News and Observer Sunday September 16, 2018 responding to Rob Christensen’s column in the September 2, 2018 version of the paper. I missed this last week because my N and O wasn’t delivered last Sunday due to the Storm.

In short, Mr. Christensen was criticizing a caricature of a process that is not underway at Duke. And I confirmed via email, that Mr. Christensen hadn’t read the History faculty proposal when he wrote his piece on September 2.

‘Incorrect picture’

Christensen said it was ironic that historians would consider renaming a building, but history has never been static. We learn more, understand more and consider events from different perspectives over time. There is a danger of unreflectively and hastily condemning those of the past using current standards, as Christensen suggests Duke is doing.

“While the debate over historic names and monuments is full of anger and fury, what is often missing is any context or nuance, or a sense that things are more complex than today’s sloganeering,” he wrote. What Duke University is doing is the antithesis of this.

The deliberations that lead to President Vince Price leaving the niche at the front of the Duke Chapel vacant after the statue of Robert E. Lee was removed in August 2017, took one year to complete. The Duke History Department’s proposal to rename the Carr Building is a thoroughly researched, carefully argued document that represents the opposite of forgetting history – it fully contextualizes Julian Carr’s life, his many areas of success and generosity, including to Duke, as well as an itemization of the reasons why my colleagues believe it is time to remove his name from the building.

Any renaming would be the start of a new conversation, not the erasure of the past. Christensen’s piece, written even before the Duke History Department’s renaming proposal had been released, ridicules the caricature of a process that most certainly is not underway at Duke.

The Duke University faculty handbook policy on consensual romantic or sexual relationships between faculty and students was revised effective July 1, 2018. I sent the following email to all faculty at Duke on August 30, 2018; a similar email was sent on June 14, 2018. The Duke Chronicle had a piece comparing Duke’s new policy to those of other universities.

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Dear Duke Faculty Colleagues:

The new policy on consensual relationships between faculty and students (Appendix Z in Duke’s Faculty Handbook) took effect on July 1, 2018.

I especially want to bring to your attention the following changes to the policy:

Sexual or romantic relationships between faculty and undergraduate students are now forbidden in all cases; this prohibition includes faculty who are in schools with no undergraduate students.

The rules for consensual, sexual or romantic relationships between faculty and graduate students were revised and clarified, and any such relationship between a faculty member and graduate student within the same school must be reported to the relevant Dean immediately. Sexual or romantic relationships between faculty and graduate students are forbidden if the faculty member has a position of power over the student (such as teaching them in a class, or sitting on their dissertation committee). Failure to report an otherwise acceptable sexual or romantic relationship with a graduate student in the faculty member’s same school is a violation of the policy.

Violation of this policy is considered misconduct, which is one of the ways stated in the Faculty Handbook that a tenured faculty member can be fired, or a termed appointment faculty member can be fired prior to the completion of their term.

I discussed this policy with the Deans at the August 27, 2018 Deans Cabinet meeting, and Deans will be planning school-specific adjudication procedures as allowed in the policy. Faculty should look for communication on this front from their Dean.

After broad and wide ranging consultation with the Provost, President, Counsel’s Office and the Deans, the Executive Committee of the Academic Council (ECAC) presented the policy proposal at the April 19 and May 10, 2018 meetings of the Academic Council. The Council enjoyed a robust discussion over the course of these two meetings and the revised policy that is attached was approved at the May 10 meeting — it was added to the Faculty Handbook and became effective on July 1, 2018.

You can read the History Department’s piece for yourself, but I would like to respectfully submit that the proposal developed by my historian colleagues is not characterized by what Mr. Christensen assumed must be true of it:

“…full of anger and fury, what is often missing is any context or nuance, or a sense that things are more complex than today’s sloganeering.”

The historical aspects of Mr. Carr’s legacy that Mr. Christensen noted in his column are included in the History Department’s proposal, and more. They have been working on the proposal for over 6 months, and they wrestle with the multifaceted legacy of Mr. Carr. The proposal was approved by the full History faculty in May, 2018, and further honed over the summer keeping in mind the process and principles laid out by the University for such renaming considerations.

Duke is proceeding as a community of scholars to consider the renaming of the Carr Building. And the goal is certainly not to wash away Duke’s history, but to fully tell it, using the best scholarship available as our guidance, and a commitment to reckon with what our history means for us all today.

Dear Members of the UNC Chapel Hill Board of Trustees and Chancellor Folt:

As a lifelong North Carolinian from Goldsboro, and as a 3 time alum (’90 BSPH; ’92 MPA; ’95 Ph.D.), let me first thank you for your service to my (and for most of you) our alma mater.

I came to UNC in the fall of 1986 as an uninitiated student who went to college because I thought that I was supposed to do so, and left nearly a decade later on a trajectory that has seen me become a professor, and now Chair of the Academic Council at Duke University. I have been truly blessed. These blessings were only possible because at Carolina I discovered that school was not only something you were supposed to do, but through some incredible professors and classmates, I found that the life of the mind was engaging and exciting. I have given my professional life to being a scholar and an educator. None of this would have been possible without UNC, and I am forever grateful. Thank you Carolina.

I played football at Goldsboro High School, and we had three foes in our conference from Wilmington: Hoggard, Laney and New Hanover High, and I spent many hours riding to and from games in activity buses thinking about Wilmington. However, I never heard until I was in my 30s of the 1898 “Wilmington race riot” that was as a matter of fact, essentially a coup d’etat that saw a multi-racial elected local government run out of town in racially motivated violence. Governor Charles B. Aycock is the most famous person from where I come from, and in several visits to his birthplace homestead just outside of Goldsboro, I never heard one word of his role in fomenting the political climate that enabled this event just before he became Governor, in spite of having taken an entire year of North Carolina history in 4th and 8th grade. I placed out of U.S. history via the AP exam, so did not take it at UNC. The version of post-Civil War U.S. history that most of us have been taught and told in the South is faulty and incomplete, and Carolina should play a key role in fixing this problem, not only for your students but for the entire state, country and world.

I am sure that I have walked past Silent Sam hundreds of times, beginning when I was 5 or 6 and went to UNC football games with my parents (both alums of UNC), and then of course during my nearly a decade as a student on campus. I really never thought much about the statue one way or another, until I learned more about its history, and the history of the erection of confederate monuments, generally. I have heard from many students, fellow alums and current faculty who do think about it, and they experience it as a symbol that they did not fully belong at UNC. I regret and am sorry for how tone deaf I was for so long. The faulty telling of history is not just a historical error, but it effects our world today. The University has a chance to demonstrate Lux et Libertas by keeping scholarship at the forefront of how Carolina proceeds, as is befitting of a great research University. We should commit to a full and accurate telling of the post-Civil War American experience, and the role that white supremacy played in it, and most importantly, to struggle with what this history means for us today.

Silent Sam belongs in a museum, perhaps in the Wilson Library, where a full contextualization of the statute and the role that confederate memorials in North Carolina played in imposing Jim Crow and enabling violence against black persons in our state is described and owned. The history of the epidemiology of confederate memorials most certainly does not need to be washed away, but interrogated, laid bare and communicated widely. In fact, Professor Jim Leloudis has provided an example of what public facing scholarship should look like https://spark.adobe.com/page/Z4gHJKurmmkZS/ This 5 minute lesson on the history of Silent Sam in particular, and of confederate monuments more generally, is how a research university should proceed. We need more of this, and as many voices who are willing to own their words should be invited to contribute.

As a final thought, after moving Silent Sam to the Wilson Library, the question of what to do with the plith will arise. I urge you to consider leaving the plith as it Is, a ruin of sorts, while adding more information in McCorkle place about the statue, and pointing people to Wilson Library who want to know more. This will rehabilitate Silent Sam as a tool for education, and not a symbol of white supremacy at the front door of Carolina.

Best wishes and with deep gratitude for what Carolina has done for me.

The last few weeks have been difficult ones at Duke, but the high profile incidents have merely elevated awareness of simmering problems that have long plagued our community. I tend to quickly move into problem solving mode, and my training in Public Health means that I think in terms of harm reduction–looking for small improvements or small reductions in harmful things. However, this moment in our shared history at Duke feels like a time for me as Chair of the Academic Council to listen.

In that light, I would like to invite the Duke and Durham Community to open office hours over the Summer to discuss any topic of interest to you. I set out four days between now and the middle of June below, and if there is interest I will pick some more dates for the latter part of the Summer. If you want to chat but cannot make any of these times, or if you would prefer another time, just email me and we will work out a time and place to meet. If you have an event scheduled and you would prefer me to attend that event so that we can chat, I will try and work that out as well. I will be in Durham all Summer finishing a book so I have some flexibility.

My Academic Council Office is in 203 Flowers Building, near the Chapel. We have a conference room that can seat ~12 people, and if we need a bigger room than that, we will find one.

The 25 Duke students who disrupted President Price’s address to gathered alumni last Saturday to issue a variety of demands announced today that their pending Student Conduct case has been closed with an informal letter of admonishment. The issues raised by our students are worthy of discussion, and I give them a lot of credit for activism focused on the well being of others.

However, I am worried that this episode will normalize a mode of protest that begins by telling someone who is scheduled to speak to get off the stage and not speak. I fear that this mode of protest will now be used (and reused) to shut down speakers with views that some find objectionable. That would be a terrible outcome for Duke, and much worse than last Saturday’s event, that could be viewed through the lens of a family squabble.

I would like to respectfully ask that all members of the Duke community pledge to not use this mode of protest to shut down the speech of others in the future, but instead that we commit to a robust ethic of free speech and flourishing academic freedom on campus, a task that can require special attention to insure that everyone has a chance to speak. Further, I would like for us all to imagine what it would look like for Duke to be a leader in this area.

In that vein, I highly recommend Free Speech on Campus, by Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman (Yale University Press, 2017) to us all.